Thursday, June 25, 2015

1914 in Africa

The British and the French invaded the
German Cameroons from all four points of the compass. In September 1914, the
so-called Cross River Column, from Nigena to the north, hit strong German
defences and was repulsed.

Some colonial administrators in 1914 hoped
that would not be the case. The local units they commanded were designed not to
fight each other but to maintain internal order. To many whites it seemed self-evident
that the use of colonial troops to topple other European powers could only be
self-destructive in the long term. War would rekindle the very warrior
traditions that colonialism had been designed to extirpate, and ultimately the
black trained to use a rifle against a white enemy might turn his weapon on his
own white ruler. For such men the civilising and progressive, if paternalist
and culturally supremacist, attributes of colonialism were the conditioning
factors in 1914. They hoped that they might be exempt from developments in
Europe. In Africa they pinned their hopes on the Congo Act. In 1884-5 Bismarck,
acting in his capacity as the reassuring broker of Europe, had hosted a
conference in Berlin to orchestrate the partition of Africa. The Berlin
Congress had settled that all nations would have complete freedom to trade in
the basin of the River Congo, and permitted any one of them to declare itself
neutral in the event of war. In 1914 Belgium controlled not only the eastern
bank of the river but also its estuary, and was also - given its situation in
Europe - keen to uphold the principle of neutrality. The implications for one
German central African colony, the Cameroons, were direct: French forces could
not approach it from the south if France adhered to the Congo Act. The
protection the Act gave to the others, Togoland and German East Africa (modern
Tanzania), could only be indirect. But after the war the Germans cited the
Congo Act both to support their claim to the restitution of their colonies and
to argue that they were not the only power that breached international law in
1914.

The idea that war in Europe - or at least
one involving Britain and Germany - would not spread beyond Europe was a later
construct. In 1906, F. H. Grautoff, a newspaper editor and naval writer,
published, under the pseudonym ‘Seestern’, Der Zusammenbruch der alten Welt
(the Collapse of the Old World), a fictional account of a future war,
translated into English as Armageddon 190-. It contained a real warning: ‘They
[Britain and Germany] had not stayed to consider that a war in Europe, with its
manifold intricate relations with the new countries over the seas, the millions
of whose populations obeyed a handful of white men, but grudgingly, must
necessarily set the whole world ablaze’. Grautoff’s account of the war’s
origins began in Samoa, one of a clutch of German possessions in the south
Pacific, and the name Grautoff gave its governor, Dr Solf, was the same as that
of Germany’s colonial secretary when the real war did break out. Grautoff’s
fictional war was naval and imperial in its origins. It was a corollary of
‘Weltpolitik’, the basis of German foreign policy at least until 1911.

The word ‘Weltpolitik’ therefore gave rise
to another word, ’Weltkrieg’ (world war). It was not only popular writers who
prefixed their descriptions of future war in this way; responsible politicians
like Bethmann Hollweg did so, too. They used it for three reasons. The first
was of course for effect: they were not being geographically precise. It was
not necessarily clear that Europe and the world were different. After all, to
their Eurocentric eyes any war involving two alliance blocs would be massive,
and in many contexts that was all ‘Welt’ meant. The second reason related to
Germany’s challenge to the status quo. Britain had a vested interest in peace,
because the existing order confirmed its own domination. In 1907 Henry
Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal prime minister, combined pacifism with navalism
in a logic which was self-evident to British liberals but nonsensical to
Continental powers: ’The sea power of this country implies no challenge to any
single State or group of States.... Our known adhesion to those two dominant
principles - the independence of nationalities and the freedom of trade —
entitles us of itself to claim that, if our fleets be invulnerable, they carry
with them no menace across the waters of the world, but a message of the most
cordial good will.‘

Campbell-Bannerman emphasised Britain’s
subscription to universal principles for a pragmatic reason. The military value
of the Royal Navy lay above all in its ability to protect the United Kingdom;
its capacity to defend Britain’s far-flung possessions and their trading routes
was much less assured, and relied to a large extent on the acceptance by other
powers of the Pax Britannica. If Germany found itself at war with Britain, the
latter’s overseas possessions were more vulnerable to attack than Britain
itself; its trade and its financial markets were more sensitive to danger than
were its forces in the field. Germany therefore had an interest in taking the
war beyond Europe if it could find the means to do so. Although Germany - like
the other powers of Europe - had a vociferous colonial lobby, its enthusiasm
for widening the conflict was not principally a form of covert imperialism. It
was a way of fighting the war.

This was the third reason underpinning
Germany’s use of Weltkrieg. By the same token Britain had an imperative need to
close the war down. On 5 August 1914 the Committee of Imperial Defence, an
advisory body of the British cabinet, convened a sub-committee to consider
‘combined operations in foreign territory’. Its cardinal objective was that
nothing should be undertaken which might prejudice the conduct of the war in
Europe. The principal task outside Europe was defensive, to secure Britain’s
sea routes against German attack: these were the links that would enable
Britain to tap the resources of both its empire and its neutral trading
partners. The targets of offensive operations were to be the naval bases and
wireless stations that supported the German navy. The sub-committee laid down
two guiding principles. It renounced the conquest of territory, and it declared
that any land forces used should be local formations only.

These principles proved mutually
incompatible. Those dominions and allies on whom Britain called to provide
forces for local operations proved ready to do so. But their motives were
shaped less by the needs of the war in Europe than by territorial ambitions in
their own regions. Britain did not see the outbreak of the First World War as
an opportunity to acquire German colonies; however, others on whom it relied
did. British imperialism may have been dormant between 1914 and 1918, but
so-called ‘sub-imperialism’ flourished.

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About Me

Mitch Williamson is a technical writer with an
interest in military and naval affairs. He has published articles in
Cross & Cockade International and Wartime magazines. He was
research associate for the Bio-history Cross in the Sky, a book about
Charles 'Moth' Eaton's career, in collaboration with the flier's son,
Dr Charles S. Eaton. He also assisted in picture research for John
Burton's Fortnight of Infamy.
Mitch is now publishing on the WWW various specialist websites combined
with custom website design work.